Ecuadorians in the Streets of New York City

What do people in NYC picture when they hear about “Ecuadorians”? Whose images would I capture if I began to approach people that resembled my idea of Ecuadorians? Because of an economic crisis in the late 1990s, more than 600,000 Ecuadorians emigrated to the U.S. and Europe from 2000 to 2001 (5). Including undocumented migrants, it is unofficially estimated that there are approximately one million Ecuadorians currently residing in the U.S. (5). But even in Ecuador, a country whose officers adamantly call “multicultural,” citizens are not supposed to be easily categorized, and discussions about the right image to represent its population are endless.

Besides mestizos, in Ecuador there still remain over 1000 (1) indigenous cultures that have managed to preserve their own language, followed by smaller percentages of Afro-Ecuadorians and European descendent criollos. And after one has acknowledged the language and ethnic differences, one must consider the importance of yet another layer: Class.

Being an immigrant in Ecuador, although almost 15% (2) of the population has moved to the US and to European countries, is an open declaration that one is poor. Further than that, amongst the middle class that has not left the country, immigrants are stigmatized as uneducated, lower class citizens. A fact that statistics somewhat justify. More than half of the Ecuadorian immigrant community in the US and Spain have only finished grade school (3).

Among the people in power, immigration has been addressed trough a double discourse. On the one hand, immigration is referred to as a problem, and its decrease often has been one of the visible “goals” of the government. On the other hand, 6.9% (4) of Ecuador’s annual budget depends on the money that immigrants pump into the economy each year. This is, astonishingly, more or less half of the revenue that Ecuador obtains through oil drilling.

Although Ecuadorians were heavily concentrated in the mountainous central highland region a few decades ago, migration toward larger cities in all regions—coast, andes, amazon and Galapagos—has increased the urban population to over 60% (5). From migrating to big Ecuadorian cities to taking a further step and migrate to the US or Spain, there is a small distance.

Once I started walking around Queens, looking for businesses or walking around parks that could attract Ecuadorians, I realized the kind of person I wanted to depict. I wanted to find out how those who had been poor in Ecuador were earning a living in New York. I had often seen, although intermittently, people handing fliers, selling illegal DVD’s in train stations and or fruit to car drivers on certain avenues in the Bronx and Brooklyn. None of those jobs seemed any different or better paying than what they could have been doing in Ecuador.

However, the bias in such an approach is evident. It seems rather patronizing to go out, choose the people that compel one the most, and present those stories as representative, ignoring the problem of exclusion that always arises when trying to capture and characterize a certain group of people.

Even if I didn’t consciously pursue an agenda, I was probably going to shoot pictures of people who resembled my preconceived idea of “the Ecuadorian worker.” Because the ethical aspect of any such project doesn’t depend exclusively on one’s effort to include as much as possible, but on one’s acknowledging the things one has left out.

Luckily, I came across a project that tackled this dilemma by gladly renouncing to assume any frame. Photographer Jorge Macchi had proposed “Buenos Aires Tour” to a musician and a poet, asking them to join him following the cracks of a piece of glass over a map of Buenos Aires. The lines were treated like a fictional subway line, and forty-six “stations” where invented.  They took photos, collected found objects, and recorded sounds, including the political protests of recent street demonstrations, and linked them.

It was all about chance. Neither the photos nor the captions wanted to become a documentary, the kind that when including some things exiles others. The project didn’t aspire to cut a authoritative pattern to define the city. I think that what moved them capture just whatever neighborhood chance dictated, was a need to move away from stereotypes. Something like a desire to see what happened once one stopped telling oneself what the Buenos Aires people, any people in fact, is like or does or inhabits.

This is how I began taking the pictures for the present project. Instead of breaking a glass over a map, I was going to let one person lead me to the next. At first my idea was to interview people, ask them what they thought about Ecuadorian immigrants in New York, who they thought had been ignored among them. Eventually, it became clear to me that for most people answers to these questions would not come easily. Sometimes there were long silences, as if they couldn’t find the right thing to say, or did not dare to say it. Other times, like with the man who in picture 2 is roasting guinea pigs, questions about immigration, their own and that of fellow Ecuadorians, seem to reach deeply, charging their voices with a quality that resembles a state before tears.

Working Ecuadorians in New York: 20 Images

Jose (picture 6) was a coincidence. I was in Jackson Heights, Queens, about to cross the street, and so was he. He gave me a look, as if checking me out, and commented, in Spanish, that the day was not so cold. It seemed like a strange remark to make to a person who is waiting for the green light. However, I recognized his accent. I asked to take his picture right there, as the cars still run fast in front of us. He smiled after I had shoot, reveling his golden four upper teeth. Two of them had gold stars in the middle. I wanted to know whether he was from the area, but he didn’t seem to understand. I asked again, “Where do you live?” “Yo vivo en rucu,” he said. Which means, half in Spanish, half in quichua: “I live in my house.” He went on to say he was in Queens visiting his family, that he lived in Washington, and then, without any transition, he started to point out to the biggest cars he saw parked along the avenue. “I have a car like that one, big, and like that one, and that one.” Jose had not heard about Marcelo Lucero, an Ecuadorian who had just been killed by a group of teenagers in Long Island. He wanted to have my number.

Ana Maria (picture 3), like Jose, is from Chimborazo, a province in the middle of the Ecuadorian Andes. She sells churros, long fried bread sticks filled with some sort of sweet paste, on weekends. On weekdays she cleans a department store in Manhattan. She was accompanied by her son-in-law, a young Mexican man whose mother also sells churros. “What about the attacks to immigrants?” I ask, but all she has to say is conveyed mainly by her head bending a little, her staring to the floor, and her moving her head “no” a few times. The son-in-law intervenes: “One has to stay where one’s people are.” He meant to imply that Brooklyn, where another hate crime against Ecuadorian Jose Sucuzhanay had just occurred a few weeks after Lucero’s, was not a safe area for his “people.” His answer, nevertheless, has a wider political resonance.

In fact, during a meeting organized in Grove and Myrtle streets, one of the neighborhood leaders addressed the crowd using a similar phrase but placing it in a different context The hateful crime that had ended with the life of Sucuzhanay was interpreted as an attempt to intimidate immigrants and sexual minorities. “They want us to be afraid so we won’t immigrate here anymore,” said congress-woman Nidia Velasquez. Staying with one’s people in one’s country is an option that the enraged leaders, during the meeting, saw as an option that would only strengthen and prove right the anti-immigration rhetoric in the US.

Lucero’s and Sucuzhanay’s deaths made the Ecuadorian community in the city, unexpectedly, more visible. For the meeting on Grove and Myrtle, hundreds of Ecuadorians and GLBT people emerged to show their concern. Images 18, 17, 16 and 14 show some of the people who were actively protesting against the violence perpetrated against two fellow citizens solely because of their status as minorities.

The people I chose to shoot are those who didn’t leave their poster aside. It seemed like they were empowered by presenting themselves as the bearers of this cause’s principles. People constantly repeated loudly “We want justice,” which worked like a mantra that energized them as a crowd. Other than the posters documented in these images, fliers and Union papers were being passed around, and flowers were slowly finding its way to the hands of everybody. After the meeting, to which City Council leaders and representatives from both Ecuadorian and GLBT associations contributed with speeches, the crowd headed towards Kossuth Place in Bushwick, to pay respect to the place were Sucuzhanay lost his life.

I talked to some Ecuadorians who attended this meeting, but many of them were not like the immigrants I was photographing in the streets of Queens. The people who attended, the sort who felt themselves called to participate in this political manifestation, had some kind of affiliation with associations or unions. Although I did not ask her, my personal bias tells me that, for instance, the woman in picture 1, who works six days a week early-morning-and-night shifts distributing fliers for a dentist, does not belong to a union or have insurance. Her job is to go after people around the train station in 61^st Street in Woodside, extending her hand with a flier and often being rejected, under any weather.

Finally, I think that my deliberate decision not to follow any particular track and to try to approach Ecuadorians whose work place is the street did provide a narrow focus that framed this photo essay. On the one hand, it is obvious that street workers are not the best-off Ecuadorians in New York. They have organized their lives around informal jobs—just like people without professional training does in Ecuadorian cities. But I hope that, for the viewer, it is as clear as for me that these images are not meant to define how “the Ecuadorian” looks like or does. On the other hand, I also expect that these images contribute to create a memorable human image of the “third” biggest group of immigrants in the US (2).

My own point of view about who these people were and how they would respond to a photographer changed quite a bit. Most of the people included in this essay were friendly enough to let me, a stranger who approached them in the street, take their picture without asking me why I was doing it. And they were not concerned with the fact these images would be online either. Their friendliness was surprising. It made think of a typical Ecuadorian stereotype: everybody is friendlier and kinder than anywhere else you’ve been too.

I suppose it has to do with the fact that the biggest city in Ecuador is still relatively small—three million people—and as such is an exception. Every other major city doesn’t count more than a few hundreds of thousands citizens. Moreover, the people I photographed, from Canar, Chimborazo, Riobamba, Los Rios and Ibarra, do come from small town cultures. Perhaps they have become aware of the ways of New York, but they remain a product of their provincial upbringing in a country where 99% percent of people are catholic, and where ethics and religion are tightly intertwined.

Works Cited

(1) Peoples of Ecuador. AbyaYala. 12-16-2008. http://abyayala.nativeweb.org/ecuador/pueblos.php

(2) Migration Information Source. Migration Policy Institute. 12-16-2008. http://www.migrationinformation.org/Profiles/display.cfm?id=591

(3) Una Aproximación Descriptiva a la Situación de la Inmigración Ecuatoriana en España: Los Trabajadores del Servicio Doméstico. Colectivo Ioé. 12-16-2008. http://www.monografias.com/trabajos32/inmigracion-ecuatoriana-espana-servicio-domestico/inmigracion-ecuatoriana-espana-servicio-domestico.shtml#_Toc128287864

(4) Ecuador: el Costo de la Migración. BBC Mundo. 12-16-2008. http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/spanish/business/barometro_economico/newsid_6441000/6441185.stm

(5) Background Notes: Ecuador. US Department of State. 12-16-2008.   http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/35761.htm